Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique

Q U E E R P A L E S T I N E A N D
T H E E M P I R E O F C R I T I Q U E

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Q U E E R P A L E S T I N E A N D
T H E E M P I R E O F C R I T I Q U E
Sa’ed Atshan
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California

Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
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information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of
Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Atshan, Sa’ed, author.
Title: Queer Palestine and the empire of critique / Sa’ed Atshan.
Description: Stanford : Stanford University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019037604 (print) | LCCN 2019037605 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503609945
(cloth) | ISBN 9781503612396 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503612402 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Gay liberation movement—Palestine—History. | Sexual minorities—
Political activity—Palestine. | Sexual minorities—Civil rights—Palestine. | Gay
rights—Palestine.
Classification: LCC HQ76.8.P19 A78 2020 (print) | LCC HQ76.8.P19 (ebook) |
DDC 306.76/6095694—dc23
LC record available at https://LCCN.loc.gov/2019037604
LC ebook record available at https://LCCN.loc.gov/2019037605
Cover design: Angela Moody
Cover painting: Nabil Anani, Nostalgia, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 120 × 105 cm.
Courtesy of Zawyeh Gallery and the artist.
Typeset by Motto Publishing Services in 10/14 Minion Pro

Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: “there is no hierarchy of oppressions” 1
1 LGBTQ Palestinians and the Politics of the Ordinary 27
2 Global Solidarity and the Politics of Pinkwashing 71
3 Transnational Activism and the Politics of Boycotts 112
4 Media, Film, and the Politics of Representation 143
5 Critique of Empire and the Politics of Academia 183
Conclusion: “we were never meant to survive” 213
Notes 223
Index 257

vii
Preface
I TRA CE M Y Q UEER C O NS C IO USNESS to 1999, when I was a fif-
teen-year-old adolescent. I have vivid memories of the time I spent with my
male friends, filled with laughter and joy. But I also experienced bewilder-
ment and disorientation when we looked at pictures of women and when my
friends expressed their attraction to them.
“Why do I not desire the same? Why am I finding myself drawn to other
boys?” I asked myself. But the mere thought of exploring the answers to my
questions led to feelings of deep shame. There was no conceptual tool kit or
vocabulary and no words in Arabic that came to mind to help me navigate
what was becoming a journey of self-discovery.
“When two men lie together in bed, the throne of God shakes with an-
ger!” After hearing these words from a preacher through the loudspeakers of
a local mosque as I walked past it one day, I vowed to never let anyone know
about the thoughts raging inside me.
I then became particularly sensitive when strangers and family members
commented that my voice was not deep enough, my grip not firm enough, my
walk not straight enough, or my posture not bold enough. I felt grateful and
relieved that I attended the Ramallah Friends School, a Quaker institution es-
tablished in Palestine in 1869. Books become my sanctuary, and theater be-
came my escape. I loved taking on roles as Tiresias and King Arthur, because
they made me feel as if I could project a more masculine self.
The Second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation,

viii Preface
was omnipresent in 2001. I remember the visceral malaise in my stomach
from eating only lentils while trapped under military curfew. The sounds of
helicopters, bulldozers, bombs, funeral processions, and protests all around
us were frightening, but eventually I could not fall asleep unless I heard the
shooting outside. The soldiers raided our house, targeting the men. They took
my grandfather, father, and me for questioning. I trembled with fear. “Be
strong; be a man.” I could hear my father saying that to me without him even
having to utter the words. But he, too, was quivering. I was frozen while at-
tempting to broaden my shoulders.
I pushed myself harder than ever that year, achieving the rank of first in
my class and being elected president of the student government. Yet nothing
cured the melancholy of realizing that I could not live up to the expectations
of hegemonic masculinity placed on men in my society.
I was thrilled to arrive at Swarthmore College in 2002, an institution out-
side of Philadelphia that was also founded by the Quakers. The violence of the
Second Intifada continued back home. I worried about my family every day,
and I was consumed with guilt for leaving my people behind for this idyllic
campus, all of which is an arboretum. The tragic events of September 11, 2001,
were still fresh. “I never knew there was affirmative action for terrorists!” A
fellow student exclaimed that after discovering my Palestinian background.
I was in shock. I wracked my brain for a response but was frozen in silence.
Being one of a few token Arab students was challenging. But I loved my
experience overall. And I was committed to fitting Middle Eastern Studies
into my academic pursuits while educating my peers about the region and
promising myself to try to never be silent about anything again.
I also read Audre Lorde for the first time. She writes, “For we have been
socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and defi-
nition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the
weight of that silence will choke us.”1
I developed the courage to speak with openly queer students but soon
found I could not escape my feelings of alienation. Gripped by my anxiety
about coming to terms with who I am given the constant violence back home,
I had difficulty relating to queer students. I remember how my sense of isola-
tion deepened when a peer was complaining that his parents were pressuring
him to limit himself to a single boyfriend; he wanted to pursue multiple part-
ners. The difference between our concerns at that time was vast. Silence con-
tinued its hold on me.

Preface ix
In the summer after my sophomore year, I stepped out of the train station
in the Castro District of San Francisco for the first time. I stood at the top of
the hill, with the enormous rainbow flag above me and smaller rainbow flags
at each stop sign below. Numerous same-sex couples were holding hands or
walking all around me. I could not hold back my tears. A stranger saw me,
walked over, gave me a hug, and said, “I know. I know. It will be okay.”
Through my internship at the American Civil Liberties Union in Califor-
nia that summer, I had unconsciously made a gay pilgrimage to San Fran-
cisco. There I discovered the group SWANABAQ (South West Asian and
North African Bay Area Queers). It finally dawned on me that I was not the
only gay Arab on the planet. I had my first relationship that summer, began to
accept myself, and then revealed my sexual orientation to my closest friends.
But I remained vigilant about protecting my privacy.
I spent the fall semester of my junior year of college at the American Uni-
versity in Cairo and then the spring semester at the American University of
Beirut. Farha Ghannam, my advisor and mentor at Swarthmore and a bril-
liant Middle East anthropologist, introduced me to anthropology and helped
me gain a deep appreciation for the discipline. She also served as my faculty
mentor for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, a scholarship pro-
gram for minority students interested in becoming academics. Ghannam en-
couraged me to conduct thesis research comparing the LGBTQ communities
in Beirut and Cairo. I fell in love with ethnography and found it exhilarat-
ing to be immersed in queer social milieus in the Middle East. I spent sig-
nificant time in Beirut at Helem (“Dream” in Arabic), the first LGBTQ or-
ganization in the Arab world. This allowed me to bring together two salient
identities: being queer and being Arab. Up until that point, I had experienced
these identities only in tension with each other, and it has simply been with
time that I have learned to appreciate how connected they are in me.
I was taken with the scholarship of Palestinian academic Joseph Massad,
particularly his critiques of what he terms the “gay international” agenda. I
drew on that work, particularly his article “Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay In-
ternational and the Arab World,”2 and Michel Foucault’s The History of Sex-
uality to problematize the universalizing of LGBTQ categories from the West
to the Middle East. In my thesis, I described the gay flag in the United States
as a form of nationalism and cited Foucault’s assertion that the “Western man
has become a confessing animal”3 (which he linked to Catholicism) to delin-
eate the limits of coming out discourses for queer Arabs.

x Preface
In discovering Massad’s work, I was excited to finally see the topic of gay
Arabs taken seriously as a scholarly endeavor. That led me to internalize his
analysis. It was only later, with more self-confidence, that I realized I needed
to consider that analysis more critically. I then questioned the simple binaries
between East and West that I had reified in the thesis project. My coming out
had taken place in an academic setting; so queerness, scholarship, and aca-
demic acceptance have all been tied up for me. I had excelled in academia as a
way to compensate for the shame of homosexuality. Personal self-acceptance
has subsequently enabled me to embrace a more nuanced academic voice.
I graduated from Swarthmore in the spring of 2006, receiving an award the
institution named that year—the Edward Said/Audre Lorde Scholar-Activism
Award. It was an honor, but it was also daunting to receive because of my ex-
periences with impostor syndrome in the academy and because of how tower-
ing both those figures were in my intellectual and political imagination.
With both apprehension and excitement, I arrived at Harvard University
that fall, matriculating at the Kennedy School of Government for the master’s
in public policy program. I was eager to undergo professional graduate train-
ing after my liberal arts undergraduate education. The knots in my stomach
I had the first year of college returned to me that fall when I realized that I
was the only Palestinian student at the Kennedy School and merely one of a
handful of the LGBTQ caucus members there. It was in becoming increas-
ingly open about my Palestinian and queer identities that I grew more secure,
self-loving, and at ease at Harvard.
I returned home to Palestine the summer after my first year of graduate
school to intern with the unit overseeing high-level Palestinian negotiations
with Israel. My family did not yet known about my gay identity, but a num-
ber of close friends and colleagues did, and they were supportive. They shared
with me that a Palestinian who had recently worked with the same negotia-
tions team in a significant position had been completely forthcoming to every-
one—including at the highest levels of the Palestinian political leadership—
about the fact that he was gay. They also shared that no one had given him any
trouble about his sexuality. That possibility had been unimaginable to me un-
til that point. I had never heard of, let alone met, an openly queer Palestinian.
After completing my master’s degree, I immediately began the joint PhD
program in anthropology and Middle Eastern studies at Harvard. I chose to
study the politics of international humanitarian aid in the Occupied Palestin-
ian Territories. Israel’s military offensives in the Gaza Strip, and the unfold-

Preface xi
ing humanitarian crisis there, became increasingly devastating. I channeled
my desperation into research about the topic.
During my final pre-fieldwork visit home, I began to anticipate what to
expect upon my return the following year for fourteen consecutive months of
ethnographic research. I wondered whether I could ever resettle in Palestine
and live as an openly gay man. “Is it safe?,” I asked myself. I had heard about
people being disowned or met with violence from their families due to their
sexuality. I had also heard about queer Palestinians being forced by the Israeli
occupation forces to serve as collaborators and informants.
I confided in a dear friend about my sexuality, and he became deeply un-
comfortable. I had been very close with him and his family in Ramallah. They
were devout Palestinian Christians, and his father worked for a local church.
The religious traditions of both Christianity and Islam in the Levant have
been inhospitable to compassionate reception of homosexuality in the con-
temporary context. When I went to see my friend and to visit his family the
next day, his father opened the door, his face filled with sadness, and then in-
formed me that he was the only one home. He invited me to sit on the rooftop
with him and proceeded to say that my friend had revealed to him that I was
gay and that this is unacceptable in our society. He said that I could not speak
with them anymore unless I sought to change my sexuality through particu-
lar church services. It was devastating for me to bear the pain this caused. I
looked at the sun as it began to set, felt the breeze of the evening air, mustered
every bit of strength I could, and then graciously replied that it was not possi-
ble for me to change. No one from that family has spoken to me since.
During my last night at home that summer, as I looked around into the
caring eyes of my family members, I imagined them withdrawing their love
for me if they discovered my secret. The thought of living in exile as a result of
familial homophobia was too much to bear.
In 2010, I established a research base in Bethlehem and began my field-
work on international aid. Only days after my arrival, one of my straight fam-
ily members, whom I had never come out to about my sexuality, introduced
me to one of his gay friends in the hopes that we would date each other. He
succeeded in facilitating this romantic relationship. It came as a complete
surprise to me that a relative would not only know about this aspect of my
identity but also be so supportive. He shared that he promised to keep his lips
sealed but that I should also remember, as he put it, that “we are your fam-
ily, and we love you, and we just want you to be happy.” I have never been able

xii Preface
to forget those words. They also planted seeds of confidence for me to come
out to my parents two years later, even though I was consumed by dread; one
never knew what kind of visceral response to expect.
I discovered that in the years I had been away studying in the United States,
a queer Palestinian movement in Israel and the West Bank had emerged. I
then joined an LGBTQ Palestinian organization, Al-Qaws (short for Qaws
Quzah, or “rainbow” in Arabic), and became an activist with the group, co-
facilitating a workshop series in the West Bank on queer Palestinian empow-
erment. Through this work, I saw how the figure of Joseph Massad, whom I
had admired as a college student during my thesis writing, loomed over queer
activists in the region. They shudder at the prospect of being called “local
informants” of the “gay international” by him and his followers. Being im-
mersed in the queer Palestinian movement forced me to revisit my previous
embrace of Massad’s framework and to understand how East/West binaries,
the language we use, and the political projects we espouse are not black and
white in the increasingly globalized and transnational world in which we live.
I have since aspired to pursue engaged scholarship that makes room for more
complexity.
Two Palestinian organizations and initiatives, Al-Qaws and Aswat (“Voices”
in Arabic, also known as Palestinian Gay Women), came together in 2011 and
worked with prominent queer writer and activist Sarah Schulman to orga-
nize the first LGBTQ delegation from the United States to Palestine. I agreed
to serve as one of two coleaders of the delegation, which would accompany the
sixteen American delegates for the full ten days in Palestine. On the eve of the
delegation’s start, I decided that it was time to come out to my broader fam-
ily. My mother’s response will be with me forever. Upon sharing that I am gay
with her in Arabic, she replied,
The reason that I am crying is that I cannot believe you have gone through all
of this without me. I wish that I had been able to be by your side. But I am now
comforted that you have come to me. I am proud of you for how far you have
come. I did know deep down inside, like every mother does, but we hold on to
the doubt until it is confirmed to us otherwise. I want you to know that my re-
spect for you has only increased. This is something incredibly difficult in our
society, but you are my son. I love you, forever and always.
No words of my own have ever been able to communicate the depth of my
gratitude for her words.

Preface xiii
Buoyed by familial support, I have since become public in my activism
in the global queer Palestinian solidarity movement. Trips home to Palestine
during Christmas and summer breaks also have kept me connected with the
developments on the ground for my community of queer Palestinians. I am
now determined to help advance a new generation of scholarship in LGBTQ
Middle East/North African studies.
In writing this book, I chose to approach it using a global framework of
solidarity with Queer Palestine and to include my autoethnography, which
traces my own political and intellectual development as a person, activist,
and scholar over the past twenty years. I selected diagnostic events that mark
critical junctures in my consciousness as a queer Palestinian. This inclusion
also speaks to the coming out genre with which many queer readers are fa-
miliar. In my own life thus far, I have been a witness and participant in the
Palestinian landscape in three distinct periods: before the emergence of the
queer movement in Palestine, after the rise of the movement locally in 2002
and internationally in 2009, and currently in its moment of plateau that be-
gan in 2012.
By exploring my own engagement with the global queer Palestinian soli-
darity movement, I offer an autoethnographic4 account of how I have come to
approach the issues surrounding Queer Palestine as an academic and activ-
ist. Carolyn Ellis and Arthur Bochner link autoethnography to autobiogra-
phies, defining autoethnographies as works that “self-consciously explore the
interplay of the introspective, personally engaged self with cultural descrip-
tions mediated through language, history, and ethnographic explanation.”5
As an anthropologist, I am drawn to a particular form of autoethnography—
analytic autoethnography as delineated by Leon Anderson. He explains, “An-
alytic autoethnography has five key features. It is ethnographic work in which
the researcher (a) is a full member in a research group or setting; (b) uses an-
alytic reflexivity; (c) has a visible narrative presence in the written text; (d) en-
gages in dialogue with informants beyond the self; and (e) is committed to an
analytic research agenda focused on improving theoretical understandings
of broader social phenomena.”6 Finally, this autoethnography demonstrates
how my analysis and knowledge production in the domain of Queer Palestine
shape and are shaped by my positionality and my deeply close and personal
proximity to this material. As Paul Atkinson writes, “The very possibility of
social life and of understanding it ethnographically depends on an elemen-
tary principle: the homology between the social actors who are being studied

xiv Preface
and the social actor who is making sense of their actions. It is this principle
that generates the ethnographic enterprise.”7
In this text, I was willing to study myself critically to put myself under
the same analytical scrutiny as others, to situate where I am, and to decen-
ter/denaturalize my authorial perspective by situating it. I draw attention to
the places that animated my queer consciousness and the trajectory of the
global queer Palestinian solidarity movement. And although I certainly can-
not speak for all queer Palestinians, I invite readers to join me in reflecting on
my deeply personal journey.

xv
Acknowledgments
F IRST , A ND M OST I MP ORTA NT LY , I am forever grateful to the peo-
ple of Palestine for modeling collective warmth and resilience each and every
day. Their tenacity is the primary source of my inspiration to keep moving
forward. Although survey data reveals that my society of origin overwhelm-
ingly holds unfavorable views on LGBTQ issues, rendering it impossible for
me to live with equality as an openly gay man were I to return to Palestine
permanently, my love for my ancestral land and compassion for its people
only deepens. That society has shaped me into the person I am today. My
LGBTQ rights activism is naturally an extension of the struggle for Palestin-
ian human rights, to which I am also deeply committed. I truly believe that
my people, with increased political freedom and exposure to more knowledge
on queer struggles, would largely embrace their queer and trans family mem-
bers, neighbors, and other LGBTQ individuals and communities.
This book project developed from a paper I gave at Brown University in
2013. Their Middle East Studies program hosted the “Knowledge Produc-
tion, Ethics, Solidarity” Engaged Scholarship Workshop that year. This work-
shop connected me with scholars from other universities who were thinking
through the relationship between the academy, activism, and the contempo-
rary Middle East. I then accepted a fellowship for the following two years at
Brown’s Watson Institute for International Studies. This enabled me to host
a conference there in 2015 on LGBTQ movements across the Middle East/
North Africa region. These experiences planted the seeds for my more public

xvi Acknowledgments
and extensive writing on these issues. In particular, I am profoundly thank-
ful to Beshara Doumani and Richard Locke for their mentorship during my
time at Brown.
I have since presented parts of this book’s material on the LGBTQ Pales-
tinian movement at academic conferences, including at annual meetings of
the American Anthropological Association, the American Studies Associa-
tion, the Middle East Studies Association, and the Peace and Justice Stud-
ies Association, as well as at various universities. These lectures have taken
place at institutions including Amherst College, Bates College, Boston Col-
lege, Boston University, Brown University, Columbia University, Davidson
College, Earlham College, Emerson College, George Washington Univer-
sity, Gettysburg College, Guilford College, Harvard University, Haverford
College, Humboldt University, Institute for Cultural Inquiry (Berlin), Ken-
yon College, Lehigh University, Loyola University, Macalester College, Mary-
mount Manhattan College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York
University, Northeastern University, Occidental College, Princeton Univer-
sity, Providence College, Rutgers University, Sarah Lawrence College, Swarth-
more College, Temple University, Tufts University, University of California
Los Angeles, University of Chicago, University of Delaware, University of Il-
linois Urbana Champaign, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylva-
nia, University of Puget Sound, University of Tennessee Knoxville, Vander-
bilt University, Villanova University, and Yale University. The comments and
questions posed by the students, staff, and faculty at these talks have been tre-
mendously eye-opening and have enriched my arguments.
Over the past two years, a delightful group of interlocutors have gener-
ously read parts or all of this manuscript: Rebecca Alpert, Samer Anabtawi,
Huda Asfour, Phillip Ayoub, Tareq Baconi, Soha Bayoumi, Kent Brintnall,
Sarah Eltantawi, Katherine Franke, Farha Ghannam, Aeyal Gross, Sherine
Hamdy, Yaqub Hilal, Rhoda Kanaaneh, Nancy Khalek, Tim McCarthy, Mi-
noo Moallem, Darnell Moore, Saffo Papantonopoulou, Ahmed Ragab, Jon-
athan Rosa, Omar Sarwar, Sarah Schulman, Jake Silver, Eve Spangler, and
Patty White. The fact that these brilliant minds shared their respective in-
sights and feedback on my work means the world to me. I have also benefited
from the careful editorial assistance of Matthew Berkman and Eliana Yan-
kelev. I cannot thank them enough.
I am grateful to Rashid Khalidi and the Journal of Palestine Studies com-
munity for inviting me to join the JPS Editorial Committee. Serving JPS has

Acknowledgments xvii
been an incredible privilege, and I have felt included in our field more than
ever before as a result, instilling hope in me that we can continue building
bridges between Palestine Studies and Queer Studies.
I also greatly appreciate the time that the two anonymous readers took to
review my manuscript for Stanford University Press. At SUP, Michelle Lipin-
ski’s encouragement on completion of the first draft was unbelievably kind.
I also could not have asked for a better editor than Kate Wahl at all stages
thereafter. The Middle East Studies list she has nurtured is breathtaking. I am
honored for my book to be the first one that is queer focused in this program.
The remarkable support of Lee Smithey, my colleague here at Swarth-
more College, has been a gift, providing me with a role model whose intellec-
tual passion for Peace and Conflict Studies is infectious. A group of my stu-
dents at Swarthmore volunteered to read this manuscript, and their queries
and perspectives as super bright undergraduates were very helpful. They in-
clude Hanan Ahmed, Mohammed Bappe, Marissa Cohen, Isabel Cristo, Vi-
nita Davey, Omri Gal, Zackary Lash, Cindy Lopez, Nora Shao, Therese Ton,
Lily Tyson, Nate Urban, and Lila Weitzner. Their reflections made my ideas
more clear and my writing more accessible.
The moral support of dear friends has also been invaluable—thanks to
Najib Abualetham, Naira Der Kiureghian, Sarah Goldberg, Husam Ham-
mad, Weeam Hammoudeh, Harb Harb, Maram Jafar, Kira Jumet, Reem Kas-
sis, Rashad Nimr, Jayanti Owens, Maliheh Paryavi, and Hannah Schafer.
They are beautiful souls, and I hope I am able to reciprocate their friendship.
Finally, this project would not have been possible without the love of my fam-
ily and the spirits of my ancestors.

1
Introduction
“there is no hierarchy of oppressions”
THE C ONTEMP ORARY global queer Palestinian solidarity movement
began to visibly surface in 2002. Courageous LGBTQ activists broke formida-
ble taboos and defied deeply entrenched social norms of gender and sexual-
ity to give a public face and voice to queer Palestinians. The movement then
experienced significant growth in Palestine until it reached a plateau in 2012.
Since then, the movement has neither grown nor retreated.
The foundation of the movement was built by queer Palestinians in Is-
rael/Palestine (also known as Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories
or as historic Palestine) working with or under or being supported by Israeli
LGBTQ organizations. Inspired by the Palestinian feminist movement that
argued simultaneously for the liberation of the nation and the liberation of
women, the queer Palestinian movement articulated the need for a similar
cause that is not dependent on Israeli institutions. As a result, queer Palestin-
ian citizens of Israel, and lesbian women in particular, catalyzed the rise of
the Palestinian LGBTQ social and political sphere. Thus, in many ways, the
queer Palestinian movement was a by-product of the feminist movement, and
many queer activists consider themselves feminists as well. These queer Pal-
estinian feminist activists in Israel then reached out to queer Palestinians in
the Occupied Palestinian Territories and built connections among Palestin-
ians across Israeli-imposed divides. At the same time, the differences between
Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and stateless Palestinians under military
occupation have sharpened an asymmetry in power within the queer Pales-
tinian movement.

2 Introduction
Queer Jewish Israelis, in showing solidarity with queer Palestinians, be-
came some of the most vigorous and vocal among non-Palestinians in the
struggle against homophobia, anti-Arab racism, and the Israeli state. Queer
Jewish North Americans and Europeans now play a disproportionately large
role in the global queer Palestinian solidarity movement, particularly as the
left—and the peace movement—has diminished in Israel in recent years. Fur-
thermore, diaspora Palestinians and non-Palestinians who are solidarity ac-
tivists work to support the queer movement in Palestine through campaigns
in local contexts, particularly in Europe and North America, which has led to
the global reach of the movement.
In recent years, those within the global queer Palestinian solidarity move-
ment and their allies have increasingly turned against one another, resulting
in deep divisions and contestation that have inhibited the movement from
reaching its full potential. Activists and members are being worn down by
the enduring nature of different and intersecting systems of oppression. There
have also been shifts favoring a subset of activists whom I describe as “radical
purists.” Their competition over moral purity, debates on representation, lim-
its on institutional capacities, rigid policies on international aid, criticism of
those to whom they are closest, and other factors have led to the fragmenta-
tion of the movement. Nonetheless, queer Palestinian activism persists on the
ground in Israel/Palestine. Solidarity with Palestine remains one of the most
dynamic and salient domains of global queer politics today.
Pinkwashing and Pinkwatching
Palestinians have long engaged in a nationalist struggle to maintain a strong
Palestinian identity in the face of military occupation by Israel. They live un-
der Israeli domination, with virtually every aspect of their lives ultimately
controlled by this foreign power. For decades, Israeli intelligence and se-
curity services have targeted queer Palestinians and used homophobia as a
weapon, threatening to out them to their families and communities if they
do not serve as informants and collaborators. At the same time, some Zion-
ist institutions have worked over the past decade to co-opt queer Palestinian
voices in order to attempt to justify Israel’s military occupation of Palestine
to global audiences. It is in this context that queer Palestinian activists built a
movement to respond and resist.
The queer Palestinian movement extended internationally to respond to
the Israeli state’s efforts to flatten queer Palestinian sexualities. Like many

“there is no hierarchy of oppressions” 3
states, Israel has long been concerned with its global image, devoting substan-
tial resources to diplomacy and public affairs. Israel is particularly invested
in establishing its legitimacy on the world stage in spite of the occupation of
the Palestinian Territories and its illegal practices under international law.1
The global nation-branding consulting firm East West, in its index ranking of
two hundred countries based on their reputations in international media, has
consistently found that Israel has been ranked near the bottom.2 Although
there have been some improvements in Israel’s image, the country remains
far from the point the state aspires to in terms of global public relations. Is-
raeli governments have increasingly invested in “Brand Israel” campaigns
done in the name of security, self-defense, and Israel’s reputation for having a
world-leading technology scene, expanding entrepreneurship, and what it de-
scribes as “the only democracy in the Middle East.” Sarah Schulman writes
that the Brand Israel campaign seeks to depict Israel as “relevant and mod-
ern.”3 Of particular note in these efforts to achieve liberal recognition of mo-
dernity is the Israeli state’s incentivizing of LGBTQ discourse—what queer
Palestinian activists have termed “pinkwashing.” Schulman adds, “The gov-
ernment later expanded this marketing plan by harnessing the gay commu-
nity to reposition its international image.”4
Pinkwashing is defined as a discourse on Israeli LGBTQ rights aimed at
detracting attention from violations of Palestinian human rights.5 The term
has become salient in queer activist and academic circles around the world.
The dynamic that this term signifies is as follows: rather than improve its
global standing by providing Palestinians with basic human rights, the Israeli
state and its supporters, increasingly moving to the right, seek to market Is-
rael as a state that supports LGBTQ individuals and communities.
In 2005 the Israeli government launched its Brand Israel campaign, and
Palestinian civil society launched its Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions
(BDS) movement. The BDS movement demands boycotts against institutions
complicit in Israel’s system of oppression and has motivated queer Palestin-
ian activists to cultivate transnational solidarity networks. Its genesis marked
a turning point for queer Palestinian activists, connecting their activism not
only to Palestinian and Israeli audiences but also to people around the world.6
The LGBTQ dimension of Brand Israel became a phenomenon in 2009, af-
ter Ron Huldai, the straight mayor of Tel Aviv, developed a strategy to market
Tel Aviv for gay tourism. Journalist Itay Hod elaborated on how this emerged:
“A study commissioned by the mayor’s office showed gay tourists were more
inclined to go to cities like Barcelona or Berlin rather than Israel, a country

4 Introduction
they associated with religion and war. So the mayor had an idea: brand Tel
Aviv as its own separate entity.”7 As a result, promoters of gay tourism of-
ten focus on branding Tel Aviv separately from Israel more generally. This
strategy is in line with the words of Yaniv Waizman, the Tel Aviv mayor’s ad-
viser on gay community affairs, who said, “So we made a switch. We no lon-
ger talked about Israel, but Tel Aviv.”8 In 2013, Waizman boasted about the
amount Israel spent on global gay marketing: “We now spend a quarter of a
million dollars a year on gay tourism, a fortune by Israeli standards.”9
Responding to pinkwashing galvanized queer activists within and outside
of Palestine, who identified patterns in the ways LGBTQ discourses were mar-
shaled to justify backing the Israeli state. These patterns include a bifurcation
of Israel and Palestine and a failure to recognize Israel/Palestine as a de facto
single state with Israel as the ultimate sovereign throughout for all Israelis and
Palestinians who reside there. Pinkwashers characterize Israel as a space in
which homosexuals can be safe and Palestine as a space in which homophobia
is endemic. This obfuscates the range of queer subjectivities and experiences
in Israeli and Palestinian societies while disavowing an intersectional fram-
ing of sexuality. Israeli gay pride parades then become largely emblematic of
the queer subject in Israel, as though all Israelis live as comfortably as wealthy
white European, Ashkenazi Jewish cisgender gay men in Tel Aviv.
It would be simplistic to argue that the transnational queer Palestinian
solidarity networks have been solely a response to pinkwashing. Before the
advent of pinkwashing, queer solidarity organizing was practiced in 2001 by a
San Francisco–based group, Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT),
as well as by the queer Israeli group Black Laundry. In 2008 (one year before
the introduction of the LGBTQ dimension to the Brand Israel campaign) the
rise of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) in Toronto was “followed
by a number of other groups under the name QuAIA forming in cities across
North America, most notably in New York, Seattle and Vancouver, among
others.”10
In response to the calls from both Brand Israel and BDS, queer Palestin-
ians—led by their two existing major organizations, Aswat (Palestinian Gay
Women) and Al-Qaws (Rainbow)—launched two additional initiatives that
helped catalyze the queer Palestinian movement in becoming transnational:
Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (PQBDS) in 2010
and then Pinkwatching Israel in 2011. These two organizations collaborated
with audiences abroad, primarily in Europe and North America, on the re-

sponse to pinkwashing and BDS, further building these queer Palestinian
and Arab collectives. Although there were core committed queer Palestinian
activists running PQBDS and Pinkwatching Israel, both of these initiatives
were intended to be largely virtual, with their websites attracting thousands
of people around the world looking for resources on how to engage with Is-
rael/Palestine through a queer Palestinian solidarity lens.
Pinkwatching also quickly emerged as a salient term to describe the pro-
cess of deconstructing and debunking pinkwashing. The online nature of so
much of this activism has enabled queer activists outside of Israel/Palestine
to feel that they can contribute to Palestinian solidarity with their own forms
of pinkwatching: promoting counterpinkwashing messages to their pub-
lics. PQBDS propelled the voices of queer Palestinians in the global sphere
as the BDS movement gained momentum and became more controversial.
The thought of boycotting Israeli institutions was new for many populations
around the world, especially in Western contexts, and as they were intro-
duced to arguments for and against it, they were also introduced to the ex-
istence of queer Palestinians through PQBDS statements. While the primary
focus of PQBDS’s online activism was to engage queer activists globally, their
messaging also reached increasing numbers of individuals and institutions
within civil society in Palestine. Because so many Palestinian organizations
issued and cosigned the BDS call, having queer Palestinian organizations also
endorse BDS so strongly helped to positively reconfigure local civil society
understandings of the queer Palestinian subject.
The Israeli intelligence services’ history of entrapment of LGBTQ Pales-
tinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip has contributed to the further
stigmatization of queerness in Palestinian society because of the subsequent
association of homosexuality with betrayal and collaboration with Israel.
PQBDS provided queer Palestinians with an opportunity to challenge this
stereotype and to counter homophobic prejudices; they introduced a more
nuanced discourse on queerness in Palestine, portraying it as not always a
sign of fragility, weakness, and immorality. More individuals within Pales-
tinian society began to see homosexuals as not necessarily alienated from the
nation. PQBDS demonstrated a commitment to the struggle for liberation for
all Palestinians, a visible and vocal display of strength, a clear agenda that
coupled sexual liberation with resistance of the Israeli regime, and an unapol-
ogetic assertion that queer Palestinians are an integral part of the broader
Palestinian social fabric. Queer Palestinian activists like to remind their au-

6 Introduction
diences that they swim in the same river as their straight counterparts. A crit-
ical moment in the broader recognition by Palestinians of their queer com-
patriots’ role in society and politics was in April 2011 when Omar Barghouti,
cofounder of the BDS movement, acknowledged PQBDS in a media interview
alongside the queer Palestinian solidarity activist Sarah Schulman. He dem-
onstrated that queer Palestinians are entitled to “equal rights” and that they
are integrally linked to the Palestinian national movement.11
Despite these developments, the mainstream narrative persists in many
Western circles that Israel is not only the most gay-friendly country in the
Middle East but among the friendliest gay destinations in the world. In that
way, the Brand Israel campaign has largely succeeded. For instance, GayCities
.com and American Airlines named Tel Aviv the world’s “Best Gay City.”12
This corporate branding helped obfuscate Israeli homophobia, particularly
the significant role that familial, religious, regional, personal, and affective
details play in relation to sexuality and feelings of belonging. It also high-
lights the confluence of state-sponsored branding, neoliberal logics, and the
distinctions—as well as shared features—between city and nation. At the
same time, queer Palestinians have advanced formidable challenges to Brand
Israel efforts globally. The movement’s activists have been able to claim their
share of successes, particularly in forming alliances with progressive move-
ments around the world and undermining the standing of the Israeli state
among leftist queer activist communities.
Ethnoheteronormativity
What has remained consistent since the queer Palestinian movement’s incep-
tion is the notion among many queer Palestinian activists and individuals
that the two systems that they are primarily resisting are Zionism and ho-
mophobia. How the term Zionism is referenced in this text reflects the lan-
guage that the queer Palestinian movement invokes in its own work and on
the ground. Although queer Palestinians are heterogeneous and disagree on
almost every matter imaginable, they have reached near consensus on resis-
tance to Zionism as a contemporary ideology and political project. Zionism is
rooted in ethnocracy. Here, I draw on Israeli political geographer Oren Yifta-
chel’s description of Israel/Palestine as an “ethnocracy,” namely, when a “re-
gime facilitates the expansion, ethnicization, and control of a dominant ethnic
nation . . . over contested territory and polity.”13 Yiftachel elaborates, saying,

“Ethnocracy manifests in the Israeli case with the long-term Zionist strat-
egy of Judaizing the homeland—constructed during the last century as the
Land of Israel, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”14 Be-
cause Palestinians identify with the same land, the term Zionist has become
the very antonym to Palestinian identity. The movement I study is committed
to an emancipation from Zionism as mediated through Palestinians’ experi-
ences of being among its primary targets and, often, its victims.
There are debates about the different early visions for Zionism, a num-
ber of which would have, in theory, enabled Palestinian Christian or Muslim
subjects to exist equally within the Zionist political imaginary. Queer Pales-
tinians look at these debates not as the delineation of real political plans but
as intellectual exercises that obfuscate Palestinian realities and experiences.
Many of the early strands of Zionism—such as cultural and spiritual Zion-
ism, which envisioned binationalism with Palestinians—are now relics of the
past. The Labor Party in Israel eventually embraced many of Russian political
leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s revisionist Zionist ideologies, pulling Israel toward
right-wing politics and militarism. This was catastrophic for Palestinians.
Whereas some Zionists are committed to excavating and building a future
Zionist ideology and political project that incorporates Palestinians as first-
class citizens, Jewish thought leaders, such as queer theorist Judith Butler, en-
vision Jewish anti-Zionism as the ethical and requisite path forward for the
sake of Israelis and Palestinians.15 Butler is joined by public figures such as
New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg who take issue with the knee-
jerk “conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.”16 Although there can
be overlap between anti-Semitism and opposition to Zionism, distinguishing
between them is essential, and acknowledging that distinction is necessary in
order to recognize when anti-Semitism has actually become manifest.
From the Palestinian vantage point, what matters is not how Zionism is
romanticized but how it is practiced. Since the founding of the state of Israel
in 1948, the Zionist reality has been established as a discriminatory regime in
Israel/Palestine. There is not a Palestinian in Israel, the Occupied Territories,
or the Diaspora who has not been adversely affected in some way by the hier-
archies and the distribution of power that relegates Palestinians to the realm
of second-class citizenship, statelessness, or exile. The Zionism that ulti-
mately prevailed in Israel/Palestine has been profoundly alienating to the Pal-
estinian inhabitants who struggle to remain in their ancestral homeland. The
queer Palestinian movement regards the struggle against Zionism, and the

8 Introduction
ethnoreligious privileges it denies to Palestinians, as a fundamental organiz-
ing principle. Although there are many queer Palestinians who do not iden-
tify with the queer Palestinian movement, their disagreements on this issue
are largely related to the strategies, timing, and resource allocation needed to
resist Zionism.
Israel continues to apply pressure on the Palestinian people and their
leaders to recognize Israel as an indigenous nation with the right to self-
determination, the right to a “Jewish state,” the right to maintain a Jewish
demographic majority, the right to fully enfranchise only one ethnoreligious
group, the right to expand its conquest of land and natural resources in the
Occupied Palestinian Territories, and the right to deploy state and settler vio-
lence to maintain this system. Under no circumstances do the prevailing log-
ics and practices of Zionism today permit an equal distribution of land, re-
sources, or socioeconomic and civic-political rights for Palestinians.
I am certainly sympathetic to the need for Israel/Palestine to be a home-
land for Jewish Israelis (alongside Palestinian Christians and Muslims) after
centuries of global anti-Semitism, persecution, and horrific violence led to
genocide against Jewish victims in Europe. I support Israel/Palestine becom-
ing a binational country that is a shared homeland for Jews and Palestinians
and that honors self-determination for historically oppressed Jewish com-
munities from around the world. Yet the Israeli state does not need to con-
tinue its current status as an ethnocracy, lauding one ethnoreligious group
over others, in order to realize the understandable goal of establishing a ha-
ven for Jewish Israelis. In fact, perpetual conflict with the Palestinian people
on the same territory makes Israel/Palestine a land of strife rather than a ha-
ven for all. Israel’s 2018 Nation-State Law codified Israel’s exercise of national
self-determination as “unique to the Jewish people”; therefore it excluded in-
digenous Palestinians from recognition. Anti-Arab racism often underlies
the notion that coexistence with Palestinians is impossible due to a falsely as-
sumed endemic and permanent Arab proclivity toward violence against Is-
raelis. Many Palestinians view the expectation that they should normalize Zi-
onism, the very political project that has been driving their oppression for
over seven decades now, to be a form of cruelty.
Queer Palestinians, along with the rest of the Palestinian population, are
languishing under the pseudotheocratic and intensely militaristic Israeli sys-
tem that exists today. They experience Zionism as the relegation of Palestin-
ian fears, dreams, and material and psychological conditions to oblivion, ne-

glect, or suppression. This subordination is to the whims of an Israeli state
that purports to represent all global Jewish communities. The Israeli state de-
fines those Jewish populations in opposition to the Palestinian people. Israel
then maintains control over both queer and straight Palestinian lives and
livelihoods.
Gil Z. Hochberg, a leading scholar of Israel/Palestine, notes that “a key or-
ganizing principle of Zionism was the remasculinization of Jewish national
identity, a need to regenerate a Jewish masculinity and to redeem it from its
historical ties to effeminacy.”17 American Israeli historian of religion Daniel
Boyarin traces the ideas of Jewish effeminacy to European masculinity and
anti-Semitism, reclaiming the “gentle male” as integral to the Jewish tradi-
tion.18 The Israeli scholar Orna Sasson-Levy argues that dominant mascu-
linity in Israel is “identified with the masculinity of the Jewish combat sol-
dier and is perceived as the emblem of good citizenship.”19 And queer Jewish
American researcher Brandon Davis writes:
This desire for masculinity is often touted as a precondition for the Zionist en-
terprise—which would later evolve into a sometimes violent, militaristic cul-
ture. The settler frontier culture of the early kibbutzim, with its focus on both
agriculture and the military, served to remake the Jewish male as a masculine
figure. And as the Jew had been both feminized and Orientalized in Europe,
the Zionist culture similarly feminized and Orientalized the indigenous Pal-
estinian Arabs, who were also seen as inadequate.20
As the contemporary Israeli state aims to appease homophobic supporters of
Israel in certain Western religious fundamentalist contexts while represent-
ing Israel as a gay haven to supporters and potential allies in certain Western
secular contexts, the relationship between masculinity and Zionism has be-
come more fraught.
Many Israelis and their supporters perceive the Palestinian subject as ei-
ther overly feminine or overly masculine. Such a Palestinian is represented
only either as a victim of internal Palestinian homophobia or as a violent per-
petrator of homophobia among Palestinians and terrorism against Israelis.
The Israeli subject is meant to have transcended European effeminacy and is
so securely masculine that he can accommodate masculine homosexuals into
the political imaginary as well as, in some cases, effeminate homosexuals in
his midst. Women are expected to contribute to the cultivation of the mascu-
linity of the men in their local and national worlds.21 The conflicts within Is-

10 Introduction
raeli discourse between heteronormativity and gay friendliness and between
Zionists and Palestinians all focus on male experiences and stand silent on
questions of Palestinian women’s sexuality. The queer Palestinian movement,
led disproportionately by women, has attempted to address that silence.
As readers will see, the struggle against Palestinian homophobia and toxic
masculinity is equally important as that against Zionism, and the potency
of this homophobia and masculinity in queer Palestinian lives can be just as
devastating. The compulsion of heteronormativity in Palestinian society is
the expectation that citizens will contribute to the normalization of gender
binaries and gender norms—with gender and sexual orientation being neatly
mapped onto one another according to reproductive organs—and to the dis-
avowal of gender and sexual pluralism. The intensity of heteronormativity in
Palestine places unimaginable pressure on young people to enter into hetero-
sexual marriages, to produce offspring, and to abide by strict gender and sex-
ual norms that are consistent with pervasive norms connecting religion and
nationality. This is tremendously suffocating for the vast majority of queer,
trans, and gender-nonconforming Palestinians.
Meanwhile, in their everyday existence in Palestine, queer Palestinians
face what I call “ethnoheteronormativity.” This reality is the result of life as
racialized queer subjects experiencing intertwined oppression from dual sys-
tems of ethnocracy on one hand and heteronormativity and toxic masculinity
on the other. As for the global queer Palestinian solidarity movement, it un-
dermines Israeli state efforts in diplomacy and public relations on an interna-
tional scale. The movement models resistance to the confluence of gendered
and sexualized settler-colonial nationalism.22
The queer Palestinian solidarity movement is under scrutiny from Zion-
ist critics across the political spectrum who, drawing on dehumanizing ra-
cialized discourses, insist on characterizing Palestinians as uniformly and vi-
ciously homophobic. Simultaneously, some leftist critics demand that queer
Palestinians subordinate resistance to Palestinian homophobia to a Palestin-
ian nationalist struggle that fails to acknowledge them. And there is a cadre
of international intellectuals who accuses them of enacting their Palestinian-
ness in ways that are not affirming of radical purist activists and theorizing
professors.
Certain actors in the global queer Palestinian solidarity movement have
subsequently prioritized the struggle against Zionism over that against sys-
tems of oppression internal to Palestinian society. Because the radical pur-

ist focus is on anti-imperialism, resistance to Zionism emerges as the prior-
ity of these actors given the association between Zionism and imperialism. In
some circles, the issue of Palestinian homophobia is neglected as a result, and
a form of what I have termed “discursive disenfranchisement” is in force. The
languages of certain social movements—here, ones challenging Palestinian
homophobia—are under discursive assault from a subset of vocal radical left-
ists who take issue with the naming of Palestinian homophobia. These radical
purists often attribute the mere articulation of the term homophobia to impe-
rialist origins and agendas. Since the most fundamental concepts at the heart
of the queer Palestinian movement are associated with anti-imperialism,
members of this movement find it demoralizing to be subjected to charges
of complicity with imperialism. This criticism denies queer Palestinians the
right to name their own experiences or to be citizens of the world who can
choose dialogue partners according to their own desires.
Queer Palestinians thus experience a naturally resulting voicelessness be-
cause of queer Zionist activists who aim to prevent the naming of Israeli op-
pression. Queer Palestinians then find themselves under surveillance for dar-
ing to use terms for self-identification or for articulation of their struggle,
including Zionism, occupation, apartheid, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender,
queer, and even homophobia. This discursive disenfranchisement reaches ac-
ademics like me who subsequently find it challenging to identify and describe
the “social facts”23 influencing the lives of queer Palestinians. Although so-
cial facts are socially constructed, they remain important for shaping people’s
subjectivities. This book, then, is a response, in our own voices, to the con-
straints on the representation of queer Palestinians.
As they navigate their political and social milieu, queer Palestinians face
systems from all directions of marginalization, policing, and repression of
both Zionism and homophobia. The structure of ethnoheteronormativity at-
tempts to recast queer Palestinian political subjectivity in terms of patriarchal
and state logics. This makes spaces for radical hybridity invisible; if queer Pal-
estinians combine critiques of homophobia and Zionism, their critiques be-
come invisible because the terms they are using (gay and lesbian) to critique
homophobia are seen as by-products of Israel and the West’s colonial agenda.
Compounding the force of ethnoheteronormativity is the fact that critiques
against it can lose efficacy. Despite this reality, the body, voice, and resilience
of the queer Palestinian subject persists in challenging the hegemonic disci-
plines of ethnoheteronormativity.

12 Introduction
Although queer Palestinian activists adopted a deeply intersectional artic-
ulation of Palestinian homophobia and resistance to Zionism, particularly af-
ter the movement’s inception, some leaders of the movement have continued
acquiescing to pulls toward radical purity and prioritization of anti-Zionism.
Yet ethnoheteronormativity in Israel/Palestine highlights Zionism’s relation-
ship to toxic masculinity, along with Palestinian nationalism’s reliance on
heightened masculinity. This includes not only the fundamental link between
gender, sexuality, racism, and nationalism24 but also the interdependence of
Israeli and Palestinian political subjectivities. Although the gaps between
queer Israelis and Palestinians are widening, largely as a result of a form of
apartheid segregating the populations, I put forward a vision of queer Israeli-
Palestinian solidarity in contesting ethnoheteronormativity and the Israeli-
Palestinian toxic masculinity that is interwoven in these societies.25 This proj-
ect thus grapples with historical legacies and delineates present dynamics but
also looks ahead to future possibilities of sexual and national liberation.
It is possible for scholarship to recognize the particular context that Pal-
estine presents to the global stage while also deexceptionalizing Palestine.
Just as ethnocracy and heteronormativity are not limited to Israel but can
be found across the world, ethnoheteronormativity shapes the lives of queer
Palestinians in a manner parallel to the experiences of racialized queer sub-
jects elsewhere. As far-right, populist, ultranationalist movements gain power
internationally, with their combination of ethnic chauvinism, religious na-
tionalism, toxic masculinity, and homophobia, queer subjects and LGBTQ
activism and social movements are increasingly under siege. As Israeli state
leaders deepen Israel’s strategic alliances with forces such as Jair Bolsonaro in
Brazil, Victor Orban in Hungary, Matteo Salvini in Italy, and Donald Trump
in the United States, among others, we see the global reach of ethnohetero-
normativity. Although such political currents undermine queer civil soci-
ety in palpable ways, they also present opportunities for queer Palestinian ac-
tivists to further cultivate transnational queer resistance and solidarity with
their counterparts living under ethnoheteronormativity in other contexts.
Intellectual Foundation
This book is ultimately concerned with how transnational progressive social
movements are able (or not) to balance struggles for liberation along more
than one axis at a time. The underlying goal of my focus on the case of the
global queer Palestinian solidarity movement is to empower queer Palestin-

ians to achieve national and sexual freedom. Activists around the world cel-
ebrate that over the past eighteen years, this LGBTQ social movement has
arisen in Palestine and has become a transnational queer Palestinian solidar-
ity movement. The global networks and reach of the Queer Palestine sphere
are now formidable. But like many movements on the left, a vanguard of rad-
ical purists has taken hold of the leadership, attempting to maintain ideologi-
cal conformity among its ranks. The political currents of radical purism have
subsequently helped transform the critique of empire into an “empire of cri-
tique” in which queer Palestinians—and to a large extent, many of their al-
lies—find themselves under numerous overlapping regimes of surveillance,
suspicion, and control. They face the same sets of conditions as their queer
counterparts in the broader Arab region and other regions, but they must also
navigate the particularities of their local context. Whether from Israeli state,
society, and security bodies; from pro-Israel activists; from Palestinian politi-
cal, armed, religious, social, and familial institutions; from international aca-
demics, journalists, and filmmakers; and even internally from the movement
itself, queer Palestinians are regularly being met with critiques that span a
wide range of seemingly insurmountable concerns and criticisms.
My formulation of the empire of critique as a theoretical framework also
reveals its three major consequences. First, queer and trans Palestinians face
discursive disenfranchisement from many directions, with their ability to ar-
ticulate a sense of self and to employ conceptual tools to define their identities
and their movement increasingly coming into question. Second, despite the
concomitant forces of ethnoheteronormativity, what was initially a queer Pal-
estinian struggle for both national and sexual liberation has in more recent
years prioritized resistance to Zionism over resistance to homophobia. Third,
the global queer Palestinian solidarity movement is no longer experiencing
growth; while its activism and influence are not decreasing, it is currently at
a plateau. As my next chapter will examine, the intensification of the empire
of critique has led to alienation, implosion, and the loss of family, community,
and even life for queer Palestinians.
Although the movement is no longer ascending as it was during its first de-
cade, when the empire of critique was not as vast and totalizing as it is now,
it has nonetheless continued its advocacy in Palestine and around the world.
This activism has survived as a result of capturing leftist camps of global queer
movements. Its current strategies are not conducive to engaging queer activ-
ists and organizations outside of the most radical ends of the political spec-
trum. Nonetheless, the survival of the queer Palestinian movement is a testa-

14 Introduction
ment to extraordinary achievements; the queer Palestinian spirit of agency,
defiance, and creativity is especially formidable, despite the daunting pres-
sures and forces working to constrict it.
This study and its anthropological foundation serve as both an ethnogra-
phy of the movement and a documentation of its history. Although my inves-
tigation is by no means comprehensive, I have selected critical junctures from
2001 to 2018 that illustrate how different global actors and contingents have
entered this story through time, introducing new rubrics for gauging, judg-
ing, and critiquing the words and intentions of queer Palestinians and their
allies. I synthesize not only public debates that I have followed for a decade in
the press and on social media but also my activism, ethnographic research,
and sixty-five formal and informal interviews in the Middle East, Europe,
North America, and Latin America. This is in addition to the autoethnog-
raphy featured in this book. Beyond this study’s personal and political rele-
vance, it serves as a contribution to knowledge production and theorization
in studies of the Middle East, Israel/Palestine, anthropology, queer theory,
peace and conflict studies, and literature on social movements.
I am interested in queering scholarship on Palestine and going further
than that. “Queering” has emerged as a common academic trend to point out
homophobias in various forms. But with major queer Palestinian solidarity
activists in Europe and North America making a significant impact by utiliz-
ing queering methodology, allegations of a gay international Western impe-
rialist agenda in the Middle East have effectively been resuscitated. Such alle-
gations are problematic for the discursive disenfranchisement that underlies
them. Queering Palestine has plateaued because it has not sufficiently inter-
articulated critiques of heteropatriarchy, Zionism, and coloniality, but I aim
to introduce a new valence into the discourse on Queer Palestine. I hope that
academics and activists who are interested in contemporary progressive so-
cial movements beyond Palestine will also identify resonances and useful in-
sights for their own contexts.
A watershed moment for the global queer Palestinian solidarity move-
ment was the publication of the October 2010 special issue of the GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, which was titled “Queer Politics and the
Question of Palestine/Israel.” Edited by Gil Z. Hochberg, the issue was a criti-
cally important discursive and political event because it brought queer Pales-
tinians into the academic spotlight in a manner that was unprecedented. The
material presented by the issue’s contributors continues to resonate today.26

An equally critical moment came with the appearance of “Queering Pal-
estine,” the spring 2018 special issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies,27 ed-
ited by three remarkable Palestinian women scholars, Leila Farsakh, Rhoda
Kanaaneh, and Sherene Seikaly. They solicited ten pieces on the relationship
between Palestinian studies and queer theory—three stand-alone articles and
a roundtable featuring seven contributors, including me. Seeing queer Pales-
tinians and those who care about them brought to the forefront of scholarly
work in the leading journal in Palestine studies was encouraging. The pub-
lication of this series was an invaluable first step toward opening the door
for potential future engagement on the empirical realities of homophobia and
queer agency in Palestine and beyond.
Fortunately, a nascent subfield of queer Arab studies is coalescing, and
this anthropological book on Queer Palestine will have arrived after the intel-
lectual contributions of anthropologist Sofian Merabet. Merabet’s Queer Bei-
rut (2014) has been described as the “first ethnographic study of queer lives
in the Middle East.”28 Preceding texts have addressed queer themes in the re-
gion, such as Orientalist writings on travel and homosexual encounters in the
Arab world, but it is rare to find rigorous, analytical, fieldwork-based schol-
arship on queerness in the region. Merabet’s book on the lives of young gay
men in Beirut is an exception. Merabet reminds his readers of Judith But-
ler’s conception of queer as “a site of collective contestation.”29 He defines
queerness with regard to the etymology of the word queer, namely the Ger-
man word quer, or “transverse, cross, oblique.”30 The queer subject is one who
“thinks and translates outside the normative box and against the dominant
paradigms . . . whose very habitus is to invest in the countless ramifications
of ever-shifting epistemological intersections,” and who is a “prisoner of love
whose captivity is ever entangled with the very object of his desire.”31 I adopt
this understanding of queerness as it relates to the queer Palestinian move-
ment, particularly with regard to “dissident sexuality.”32
Queer Beirut emphasizes space and how queer Lebanese men contest and
appropriate that space in the city, even with the “always looming potential of
violence.”33 Merabet identifies the emergence of queer space in Beirut, desig-
nating “the geographical, along with the socio-cultural and mental, fields in
which various homoerotic practices take place and are being integrated into
the respective lives of different individuals.”34 Even while these queer spaces
“challenge and rupture”35 heteronormativity, they “are perpetually contested
by a multiplicity of subjects and subject matters.”36 A “homosexual sphere”37

16 Introduction
in Beirut emerges with “zones of queer encounter.”38 Merabet’s ethnography
traces the “intricate social processes of ascertaining a queer presence in Leb-
anon.”39 Although space does not feature as centrally in my book, Merabet’s
example nonetheless provided a framework for my recognition of the homo-
sexual sphere with zones of queer encounter in Palestine and the social pro-
cesses that have subsequently shaped the queer presence in the global Pales-
tinian solidarity community.
A critical distinction between Queer Beirut and this book is my represen-
tation of queer women as well as the ethnographic accounts of queer activ-
ism and individual lives. Merabet writes that his scholarship “is not on orga-
nized activism, but the ethical practice that is at work through the politics of
what [he] like[s] to call a ‘queer habitus.’ It is a politics that amounts to the in-
dividual challenge directed toward social norms, on one hand, and the em-
bodiment of alternative identity formations on the other.”40 I see value in ac-
ademic work that extends such conceptions of queer habitus to the realm of
local and transnational activism. Furthermore, queerness is where we can ex-
pand, rather than limit, the spaces of possibility for self and collective expres-
sion and engagement with the world.
This ethnography of the Queer Palestine sphere includes the domains
of queer Palestinians, the queer Palestinian social movement, the ways ho-
mophobia and Zionism reinforce one another, and the ways queer Palestin-
ians are talked about in global contexts. The Queer Palestine sphere is there-
fore both local and global. Queer Palestinians, whether or not they are part of
the movement, are part of this sphere, and many non-Palestinians are as well.
Because queer Palestinian bodies in this sphere face ethnoheteronormativity,
this book focuses on queer Palestinian voices and experiences in this context.
It also includes nonqueer Palestinian actors who are central to the queer Pal-
estinian experience because of the movement reaching Israel/Palestine and
other geographies, mainly in North America and Europe. Global queer Pales-
tinian activism is largely a response to transnational discourses on queer Pal-
estinians, whether from locals or those abroad who are with them in solidar-
ity or even antisolidarity.
Critique of Critique
Anthropologist Didier Fassin’s essay “The Endurance of Critique” has been
an inspiration, shaping my definition of critique and my conceptualization of

the empire of critique (hence the subtitle of this book).41 Fassin makes a pow-
erful case for the enduring nature of critique in anthropology as well as for
the necessity of critique to our discipline and practice. Fassin lauds Edward
Said’s critique of Orientalism for exemplifying how critique requires explica-
tion, reaffirmation, openness, and consistency in the face of misunderstand-
ings and misappropriations.42
Fassin cautions against automatically disqualifying and dismissing cri-
tiques as anti-intellectual, passé, or “mere mantra.”43 In fact, he argues that
critique can challenge the “unbearable lightness of being that paradoxically
characterizes certain forms of alleged radicalism as well as certain retreats
in an ivory tower.”44 He makes a case for ethnography as critique and delin-
eates how it can lead to “emancipation” by “removing the ideological veil im-
posed on people so as to allow them to realize the deception that renders their
domination possible” and by “contesting the self-evident representations of
the world they hold true while acknowledging the possibility of other rep-
resentations.”45 By invoking the work of Judith Butler, Fassin reconciles cri-
tique’s search for a “hidden truth” alongside the “regimes of truth.”46 Fassin
writes, “The ethnographer must therefore acknowledge his debt toward his
interlocutors, and part of his activity consists in transcribing and arranging
the invaluable knowledge he has received from them. However, he is not only
a cultural broker between the world he studies and his various publics. He
translates but he also interprets.”47
The critique of critique that I present should not be mistaken for a dis-
avowal of critique; in fact, I largely share Fassin’s commitment to critique as
he has delineated in his essay. My work follows Fassin and attempts to move
further. Ethnography is a form of practice, and my own reveals how actors
deploy critique to “remove the ideological veil imposed on people.” Yet some-
times critique does not remove the entire veil because certain types of critique
are (wrongly) believed to be at odds with one another. I want to move away
from critique as a generalized abstract practice and center critique on the ma-
terial lives of people and the struggles they encounter. This book is not simply
ethnography as critique but ethnography as lived critique.
Too often, unconstructive criticism is masked as critique. The Israeli legal
scholar Aeyal Gross draws on the writing of another French theorist, Didier
Eribon, to caution against “the transformation of critical thinking into polic-
ing of thought.”48 Gross explicates that critical thought “is not merely about
the denunciation of our opponents’ positions, which would only amount

18 Introduction
to criticism. Critique also entails questioning the imposition of the very terms
of debate.”49
In the case of the global queer Palestinian solidarity movement, the in-
creased radical purism has led to an ethos of “ultimate judgment” rather
than to “a critical analysis of the complex consequences of the production
of distinct truths.”50 As a member of the movement, I am sympathetic to its
anti-imperialist impulse, but my concern is that this activism will elevate
anti-imperialism above the struggle against homophobia or see the two as
disparate. This is in line with Audre Lorde’s recognition that “there is no hier-
archy of oppressions.”51
Absolving oneself from relations to imperial powers does not necessar-
ily mean that one can be absolved from other relations of oppression. The
pervasiveness of critiques in the name of anti-imperialism, alongside all the
other regimes of critique to which queer Palestinians and their allies are sub-
jected, is what has led to the empire of critique. In many ways, it is the charge
of imperialism leveled from the left against a fundamentally anti-imperialist
movement that is most debilitating. The queer Palestinian movement is sub-
jected to the disciplinary power of this discursive empire even as it helps sus-
tain it.
Fassin’s writing reveals the intimate connections between critique and
anti-imperialism in the case of anthropology in particular. He elaborates that
“the critique of imperialism [became] inseparable from the critique of an-
thropology since both were regarded as ideologically linked.”52 Anthropo-
logical critiques of empire were in many ways born after the discipline itself
was critiqued for “accompanying and even giving scientific backing”53 to co-
lonialism and “maintaining the structure of power represented by the colo-
nial system.”54
Fassin writes that “astonishment and indignation are, indeed, the two
driving forces of anthropology and, to some degree, of other social sciences.
They are what motivate critical inquiry.”55 Even in the face of Israeli oppres-
sion and Palestinian homophobia, it is my hope that queer Palestinians can
augment rightful indignation with a constant sense of astonishment. We need
to reinsert the anthropological aspects of critique into our everyday lives. Cri-
tique, as called for by Fassin, is not always the result of reading up on and
learning about things; in many cases, critique involves uncanny experiences
and encounters, a sense of astonishment that shatters previous assumptions.
Ethnographic work attunes us to the ways that even our previous critiques

can become reified assumptions by laying bare the everyday struggles of
those to which these critiques purport to apply.
I also deeply appreciate Fassin’s attention to the place of public anthropol-
ogy when leveling critique. He writes,
The encounter with publics is a source of enrichment for critique. It is a way to
test, amend, strengthen, develop and even abandon interpretations through
the confrontation with alternate views, concrete concerns, and productive
misunderstandings. . . . The work of the ethnographer cannot be limited to
academic circles. The voices it renders audible as well as the material and in-
terpretations it produces have their place in the public sphere, where it is des-
tined to be appropriated, transformed, or contested. In the end, the public
presence of anthropology . . . may be regarded as an expansion of critique into
society.56
In producing this ethnography on the global queer Palestinian solidarity
movement, I have been mindful of the need for multiple publics and audi-
ences. I wonder how we, as anthropologists and nonanthropologists alike,
can deploy our critiques with sensitivity, with proportionality to the power
that actors wield, and with attention to how our critiques interact with those
leveled by others in different domains. Many progressive movements are con-
fronting what I see as critique fatigue among their activists. If everyone’s cri-
tique was a constructive form of critical engagement, then that would pose
one less obstacle for social movements to overcome. I recognize that soli-
darity with social movements requires leveling critique at certain times and
withholding both criticism and critique at others.
Plateau
My experience within the global queer Palestinian solidarity movement as an
academic and activist in Palestine and the United States has solidified my re-
alization that the movement is currently at a plateau. This book follows my
tracing of the movement’s rise in Palestine and its subsequent global emer-
gence as a result of transnational queer solidarity networks focused on pink-
watching and BDS activism. The empire of critique, which I also account for,
has contributed to a period that began in 2012 and continues today in which
the movement is neither growing nor receding. In discussing the idea that so-
cial movements hit plateaus, I distinguish between naturally occurring pla-

20 Introduction
teaus and toxic ones. Natural plateaus are the result of the movement having
reached its natural market share in terms of audience and capacity, having
caught the attention of most of those who would be interested in its work.
Toxic plateaus are those in which the normal forward motion of a movement
is cut off, which occurs when activists find themselves besieged on all sides so
that they no longer know to whom they are accountable or how to construct
a progressive agenda. The plateauing that results from trying to construct an
effective agenda at the confluence of so many sometimes ill-considered or dis-
ingenuous critiques can be described as toxic.
The “retirement” of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) in 2015 is
one example of this toxic plateauing. The best explanation the public got for
the QuAIA retirement was from their press release, including this statement:
Over the past year, however, the deteriorating situation in the Middle East,
Canada’s involvement in attempts to suppress the movement for Boycott, Di-
vestment and Sanctions against Israel and other pressing issues have pulled
activist energies in many directions. Most of the original members who came
together during QuAIA’s formative years are now working within a variety
of fields and organizations within Toronto and internationally, stretching the
small group’s resources to continue in its current form.57
Several individuals with knowledge of the decision to dismantle QuAIA in-
formed me that internal divisions and interpersonal conflict within the group
also played a role in the leadership’s decision for activists to work in other
ways outside of the group. That being said, no group is expected to last for-
ever. But the retirement of QuAIA, together with the dissolving of another
queer Palestinian solidarity group—PQBDS—and other examples referenced
in this text, led to the plateau in which the global queer Palestinian solidarity
movement now finds itself.
In 2011, Benjamin Doherty, a vocal queer Palestinian solidarity activ-
ist, published an article that foreshadowed the plateauing of the movement.
Doherty traced pinkwashing’s duration from 2008 to 2011, declared the Is-
raeli state strategy was discredited, and hence wrote what he called its “obitu-
ary.”58 Drawing on Sarah Schulman’s work and other sources of queer Pales-
tinian solidarity activism, he wrote that pinkwashing had been exposed and
undermined. This was a premature and ambitious prognosis, considering the
persistence of pinkwashing campaigns and that pinkwatching campaigns do
not always succeed, as we will see throughout this book. Nonetheless, pink-

watching activism continues as long as pinkwashing campaigns have not de-
sisted. One factor that contributed to the loss of the movement’s momentum
was the sense among some queer Palestinian solidarity activists that their
discourse on pinkwashing was all-encompassing and therefore that the need
for their future activism was increasingly obsolete. This factor reveals the po-
tential for activism to exist within echo chambers. Although pinkwatching
activism has been far-reaching, and many LGBTQ individuals around the
world have become familiar with this queer Palestinian solidarity strategy,
the logic of queer pro-Israel campaigns remains hegemonic in many Western
spaces. Formidable pro-Israel advocates have also gained experience in de-
feating queer Palestinian solidarity activism.
For instance, in October 2016, some pro-Israel activists organized to de-
feat a pinkwatching resolution put forward by the Queer Arabs of Halifax
group at the Halifax Pride Society in Canada. Reflecting on the experience of
being present during the contentious debate on the resolution, in which re-
ports revealed that LGBTQ people of color there were—by and large—sup-
porting the motions for queer Palestinian solidarity and the removal of Israeli
pinkwashing from Halifax Pride space, El Jones writes, “It was impossible to
be a woman and person of colour in that room and not feel the intense hos-
tility. White men literally shoved their hands in my face and told me to shut
up at this meeting.”59 Jones also described how these queer people of color
walked out of the room during the deliberations and that the meeting felt “vi-
olent and harmful” to them.60 Increasingly, global queer Palestinian solidar-
ity activists, in describing their struggles against pinkwashing, have linked
this issue to the larger struggle against global white supremacy.
Even if pinkwashing was completely discredited, as some queer Palestin-
ian solidarity activists have argued, and even if pinkwashing ceased and pink-
watching was no longer necessary, the queer Palestinian solidarity movement
remains important. This is because queer Palestinians in Israel/Palestine con-
tinue to face dual forms of marginalization under ethnoheteronormativity
and therefore call for international support and solidarity. The global queer
Palestinian solidarity movement often—though not always—places queer Pal-
estinian voices and experiences front and center in its pinkwatching activism.
For every queer Palestinian or non-Palestinian who joins the queer move-
ment in Palestine or its related global solidarity movement, one has chosen
not to engage in activism in recent years. Existing activists have also ceased
their work with queer Palestinian organizing as a result of the overwhelming

22 Introduction
weight that activists in this struggle must carry. The forces of Zionism and
homophobia are now accompanied by forces of the empire of critique and the
myriad forms of alienation within the movement. These forces are not identi-
cal in power, but they all pose obstacles to the movement. There are now fac-
tions in the world of queer Palestinian organizing that disagree on how the
relationship between these forces should be understood and engaged with.
The internal critiques within the movement have led to a certain form of
debilitation, and in certain circumstances, queer Palestinian activists mir-
ror the surveillance, policing, and excommunication that is practiced against
them by parties external to the movement. With the confrontation of Zion-
ism and homophobia being so daunting and with their inability to reach the
epicenters of power, queer Palestinian activists have, at times, turned to lev-
eling critiques against other queer Palestinians. There are moments in which
those critiques address an external audience, whether to prove to a Western-
based academic that this activism is indeed radical, or to a straight Palestin-
ian that this activism is indeed nationalist, or to another activist that this ac-
tivism is morally pure. It can be puzzling to watch as Al-Qaws, the largest
queer Palestinian organization, exerts its political capital in order to launch
numerous public critiques against queer Palestinians or allies in the local
and global queer Palestinian solidarity movement. I have seen how these cri-
tiques can be animated by an underlying hope that voicing them will shield
oneself from critique. Considering the nature of the empire of critique, this
works only to further scrutiny, suspicion, and stigmatization of queer Pales-
tinians, who are already so deeply suspect. The pervasive sense that one could
be shamed or shunned anywhere at any time has contributed to the demor-
alization of queer Palestinians and the plateauing of the queer Palestinian
movement.
In this text, I have aimed to strike a difficult balance between honoring the
responsibility to give the leading queer Palestinian organizations the respect
and acknowledgment they deserve for their invaluable contributions and rec-
ognizing that this progressive movement has room to grow. Even as these ac-
tivists experience critique fatigue themselves, they play a role in helping sus-
tain the empire of critique. These dynamics are not unique to this movement
but can be found among movements on the left in many domains in many
parts of the world.
The momentum-slowing nature of internal critiques becomes evident
when considering anthropologist Sherine Hamdy’s delineation of the affect
and politics motivating muzayada. Hamdy writes,

My friend and colleague Soha Bayoumi taught me the Arabic word muzayada
that is commonly evoked in Egyptian leftist activist circles, for which there
is no ready English equivalent. People who engage in muzayada are con-
stantly upping the ante, asserting that they are even more morally pure and
politically committed than their comrades. In addition to describing a form
of political and moral competition, the term muzayada also suggests a cyni-
cal skepticism, an anticipation that what is to come is further oppression that
must be condemned. Those who engage in muzayada are judgmental and sus-
picious of others’ levels of commitment, and they are always more committed,
more dedicated than everyone else. If one expresses joy or a sense of accom-
plishment over a battle won, those practicing muzayada are suspicious that
one could ever feel victory and still be a morally and politically committed
subject who has not naively capitulated to the ploys of the oppressor.61
Hamdy adds that muzayada can leave critics “with no other choice than to
simply talk amongst themselves, preaching to choirs. Engagement requires
messiness in that meeting space between speaker and audience. Those who
practice muzayada are intolerant of the contamination that both precedes
and follows engagement with others who do not share their same moral high-
ground.”62 Hamdy also links muzayada to political impotence, arguing that
“muzayada privileges the purity of an ideological position over recognizing
a good. When we practice muzayada, we refuse to celebrate any small gain
as long as larger structural inequality persists.”63 Hamdy expands: “I under-
stand muzayada to both contribute to political impotence, and to result from
it. Shunted from effective significant change, participants turn on one an-
other and attempt to claim the pleasures of being the most radical and ideo-
logically pure.”64
While witnessing one queer Palestinian activist lambaste another on so-
cial media and observing another queer Palestinian activist critique a long list
of progressive Palestinian social movement leaders for not being morally pure
enough, it appeared to me that muzayada is also exacerbated by the temporal
and spatial distance that lies between now and the time when the structures
of Israeli occupation and Palestinian homophobia can be dismantled. When
anti-imperialism becomes the dominant focus of such activism, the perva-
siveness of empire makes it so that no one can ever truly be pure, even as the
most radical activists and academics claim that pure moral high ground.
Activism at the intersection of LGBTQ and Palestinian rights can reveal
the potential of what sociologist Eve Spangler calls the “more Mao than thou”

24 Introduction
trend in many leftist circles.65 Because progressives see themselves as chal-
lenging power and oppressive forces, they can become self-righteous to some
degree and thus think they have a monopoly on truth and morality. They can
aim to enlighten others without being genuinely open to learning from others,
as though they have figured out what there is to know due to self-authorized
expertise. They grow accustomed to being on the margins and then cherish
the purity of their positions, but when a compatriot in their movement aims
to enact social change in the world, which requires compromise, they chastise
them for that compromise. Because truly reaching the most powerful and rel-
evant institutions to directly challenge them is difficult, they turn on one an-
other due to proximity. They have often mastered the ability to deconstruct
ideas, institutions, and mobilizations with their words, but they are less vo-
cal in delineating what can be built instead. They sometimes excommunicate
those who imagine transcending the periphery by engaging the mainstream.
A social movement can grow and nurture its members when it helps enact
progressive values in interpersonal relations. Peace and justice start within
us, when we treat the people closest to us with kindness and compassion. So-
cial justice work requires humility, openness, and empathy for others regard-
ing the ethical decisions they make when resources and avenues for change
are constrained. The empire of critique reveals how easily the politics of sol-
idarity can be replaced with the politics of suspicion, thereby impacting the
growth of a social movement. With each additional critique they face, inter-
nal divisions are accentuated as activists struggle with whether to respond
and in what manner. This can lead to movement plateau and paralysis. As a
movement shifts increasingly in the direction of radical purity, nihilistic ele-
ments can begin to emerge. When the distance to realizing the ultimate goals
of the movement is unknown and as the criticism they face from countless di-
rections is amplified, activists struggle to remain cohesive and instead police
their boundaries for moral purity. It is then possible for ideological stances to
become both the means and the end of the movement.
Beyond the White Gaze
Progressives around the world are becoming increasingly introspective about
the propensity for turning against one another and about the politics of ex-
communication in their circles of activism and the social movements they
build. On social media, resources such as Frances Lee’s article “Why I’ve

Started to Fear My Fellow Social Justice Activists” have been circulating to
catalyze much-needed reflection.66 My book also serves to echo calls for pro-
gressive academics and activists to treat each other with compassion and in-
clusivity whenever possible. The overlapping systems of oppression that we
face are real, and many of us are in these struggles for the long haul. We
have no other choice because so much is at stake for our communities. In the
meantime, it is imperative that we not reproduce the harm we face among
ourselves and others along the way.
If we return our gaze to Queer Palestine, we remember that this move-
ment is not ultimately about Toronto, New York, or London but is part of a
struggle to ensure that all queer and trans Palestinians can one day lead their
lives with dignity in their ancestral homeland. Queer Palestinian activism
continues to confront critiques revolving around different political and racial
contexts: morality, civility, liberalism, coloniality, and the “gay international.”
A group of queer Palestinian activists have triumphed in building this local
and transnational movement. I foreground the valiant accomplishments of
this social movement in Israel/Palestine, but I am also interested in what its
future may be in the wake of the empire of critique.
In finding my voice and vision, I have been inspired by the work of fem-
inist Black American writer Toni Morrison, who once reflected, “If there’s a
book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write
it.” Morrison has also spoken of the “white gaze” that she has had to face in
her work: “Our lives have no meaning, no depth without the white gaze. And
I have spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze
was not the dominant one in any of my books.”67 These reflections have reso-
nated deeply with me, because in addition to the white gaze I must also con-
tend with the Zionist gaze, the heteronormative gaze, and the radical purist
gaze. One cannot overstate the politically fraught nature of this field. Zion-
ism, homophobia, Palestinian nationalism, and transnational activism from
the left and right are all interconnected, and this can be suffocating for Pal-
estinian queers. There are countless individuals around the world who feel
strongly and passionately about how this population and movement should
be represented.
Because I am a queer Palestinian who is also entrapped in forms of ex-
ternal surveillance, the development of my own consciousness in some ways
mirrors the development of this movement at large. In this context, I am most
concerned with the politics of survival of a sexual-national subaltern subject

26 Introduction
and the case for the necessary entanglement of queer and anticolonial strug-
gles. My vision is one in which radical purism does not prevail as the only
form of radicalism and in which the empire of critique can be replaced with
pluralism of thought and practice as well as genuine transnational reciprocal
solidarity.

27
1 LGBTQ Palestinians and
the Politics of the Ordinary
IN JU NE 2 015 , after the United States Supreme Court ruling that le-
galized same-sex marriage, Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar painted a rain-
bow on a part of the Israeli wall in the West Bank. He said that “his art was
meant as a reminder of Israeli occupation, at a time when gay rights are in
the news” and “to put a spotlight on Palestinian issues.”1 A few hours later,
a group of young Palestinian men responded angrily, painting over the rain-
bow in white. One of the individuals who whitewashed the rainbow told the
Associated Press that he did so because “we cannot promote gay rights.” The
young men also quoted Muhammad al-Amleh, a forty-six-year-old Palestin-
ian lawyer who supported the painting-over. He stated, “It would be shame-
ful to have the flag of gays in our refugee camp.” Khaled Jarrar added that the
painting-over of his rainbow “reflects the absence of tolerance and freedoms
in the Palestinian society” and that “people don’t accept different thinking in
our society.”2 Palestinians such as Jarrar who care about personal freedoms
in Palestinian society, including those in the realms of gender and sexuality,
connect the lack of freedom to the Israeli occupation and the resulting denial
of political freedoms. The controversy over the rainbow and its whitewashing
was debated intensely on social media among Palestinians, and it was heart-
ening for me to see, alongside the homophobic responses, numerous Palestin-
ians expressing support both for the US Supreme Court decision and Jarrar’s
rainbow. I found it ironic that the Palestinians who painted over the rainbow
took such ownership of the Israeli wall and what should or should not be on

28 Chapter 1
it—forgetting, at that moment, the oppression of the Israeli occupation that
the gray concrete represents in the first place.
Public queer resistance to oppressive Palestinian gender and sexual norms
does exist, though such resistance to homophobia in Palestine is often met
with different forms of rejection. Instances of the Palestinian public’s criti-
cal engagement with gender- and sexuality-related symbols, norms, and prac-
tices and of resistance to patriarchy and heteronormativity among queer
Palestinians are occurring largely at the private, local level. Although these
instances are sometimes linked to spaces made possible by queer Palestin-
ian organizations such as Al-Qaws and Aswat, the queer Palestinian move-
ment has, in many ways, highlighted resistance at the hands of organization-
affiliated queer Palestinians more than it has the ordinary forms of resistance
outside of formal organizations. I reflect on this certainly not in order to di-
minish the work of queer Palestinian organizations; they are valuable and es-
sential. It is possible, and indeed imperative, to lift simultaneously the voices
of formally organized queer Palestinian activists and of queer Palestinians
who move in the world independently from queer NGOs and activist groups.
All of them contribute to the movement in invaluable ways.
This chapter traces the rise of the LGBTQ Palestinian movement in Is-
rael/Palestine. The first section delineates an ethnographic approach to social
movement theory as the conceptual framework to analyze this movement. The
second section outlines the heterogeneity of queer Palestinian subjects, and
the third provides an overview of Palestinian homophobia. In the fourth sec-
tion I account for the emergence of the LGBTQ movement in Palestine, in the
fifth I discuss queer Palestinian epistemologies, and in the sixth I cover the rise
of radical purists in the movement. Finally, I conclude in the seventh section
with examples of queer Palestinian subjectivities. I argue that queer Palestin-
ian life and resistance derive their power from ordinary acts in extraordinary
contexts under ethnoheteronormativity. This chapter furthers the case for at-
tention to affect and more pluralism and inclusivity within the movement.
Ethnography and Social Movements
My ethnographic focus on queer Palestinians in Israel/Palestine serves as
a contribution to a broader understanding of social movement theory. The
scholarship of sociologist Sharon Kurtz has anchored my thinking about so-
cial movements adopting identity politics. Kurtz demonstrates how social
movements navigate pressure to simultaneously unite their members based

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